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And there we have the state of the debate over religion in contemporary life. Some secularists argue that religion has no place in the public square, but most people say it does. But these folks are deeply divided on the reasons or degree to which faith may be represented in governmental matters.

That, then, is the focus of this week's Time magazine cover story.

"Just what is the right amount of piety in the Oval Office?" asks Nancy Gibbs in this week's Timecover story (sorry, it's available only to subscribers). "Americans have shown they want a believer in the White House, but how much do they care about what he believes in? Do they want faith to affect policy? Or do they just share a conviction, as Presidents all through history have affirmed, that the Oval Office is a lonely and humbling place whose occupants need all the help they can get."

The emphasis in the main article is on Bush, while Kerry gets the focus in a sidebar. And near the end of the story, Gibbs somewhat answers her own questions: "[Bush's] talk of love and liberty brings the country together—unless it is pulling it apart. Fully 85% of Bush's supporters say his faith makes him a strong leader, according to Time's poll; 65% of Kerry's say it makes Bush close-minded." (The Economist ran a similar analysis last week.)

The division is strongest on the issues of faith and war, Gibbs writes. "It is at this point that his faith becomes more than a matter of conscience for some critics, who wonder whether his particular set of spiritual instincts both lift him up and close him off to conflicting points of view." Here she quotes heresy champion Elaine Pagels and Charles Kimball, who has written that belief in absolute truth makes one evil. Gibbs summarizes their critique: "The approach of a Christian in Bible study searching for the small inarguable nugget of scriptural truth that will enable him to understand God's love for him, ignore all distractions and stay sober, may not be the best one for deciding what to do next in Iraq."

Gibbs has her own critique of Bush's faith-based foreign policy: "At some point he risks becoming trapped in contradiction when he tries to separate the jihadists from the God in whose name they fight … It is as though Bush can't allow the possibility that the enemy is motivated by its understanding of God's will lest his critics note that he believes the same of himself."

Well, his critics are already accusing him of using the same belief structure as Osama, anyway. But often lost in such commentary is the difference between a head of state seeking God's will and a freelance terrorist doing the same. Christian theology, at least, has almost always drawn a strong distinction when it comes to state authority.

Here's the Bush/Kerry divide, as summarized by Gibbs:

However often Bush defends Islam as a religion of peace, his case for war now rests less on high-fiber geo-political arguments than on the suggestion that the 3rd Infantry Division be used as an instrument of God's will to share the gifts of liberty with all people. Kerry, in contrast, has avoided the moral language of people's God-given desire for democracy. "I have always said from Day One that the goal … here is a stable Iraq, not whether or not that's a full democracy," he said in April in New York City. Even though their strategies are increasingly similar—bring in the U.N., stay the course, press ahead with reconstruction—the rhetoric and rationale behind the strategy sound very different.

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June (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48